The overall objective of the project is to contribute to strengthening competitive and sustainable minority media outlets in the Baltics that are capable to reach out to local audiences with locally produced media content in local languages, thereby using innovative methods, multimedia content and other possibilities offered in the digital media environment. The implementation of the project will be conducted by the project owner Baltic Centre for Media Excellence (BCME) - the main actor for support of qualitative media in the region in partnership with the Nordic Journalist Centre (NJC) which will provide with Nordic best practices in the media field.

This project is a continuation of Nordic Council of Minister's support for an inclusive media environment in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 2015-2018, which was focused on strengthening production and development of independent and qualitative minority language media. Taking the experience from the previous projects including training, networking and mentoring for local Russian-language media, activities will mainly focus on the real-life needs of media outlets, such as multimedia journalism and story visualization, which intends to support media outlets to remain relevant and sustainable in a demanding media environment.

One of the project activities was a needs-assessment forum - ”Empowering Quality RussianLanguage Journalism in the Baltics”. The forum was first of its kind, gathering 4o leading representatives of minority language media outlets from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and media academics from top journalism schools in the region. As the Russian-speaking independent media community is one of the key target groups of the BCME training programme, the forum aimed to identify gaps in the skillset and business models that expert trainers could later fill in.